AMBOY and GEORGE SPENCER Shipwreck Sites

About this property

The Amboy and George Spencer Shipwreck Site is an archeological shipwreck site which consists of the wrecks of the wooden bulk freighter George Spencer and the wooden schooner-barge Amboy. Both vessels were wrecked during the Mataafa Storm of 1905. In 1994 the site was added to the National Register of Historic Places. The George Spencer (Official number 85849) was built in 1884 by the Thomas Quayle & Sons Shipyard in Cleveland, Ohio. She was built for Thomas Wilson of Cleveland, Ohio. She had an overall length of 242 feet (74 m), she was 230 feet (70 m) long between her perpendiculars, her beam was 37 feet (11 m) wide and her cargo hold was 20 feet (6.1 m) deep. She was powered by a 625-horsepower fore and aft compound engine which was fueled by a coal burning Scotch marine boiler. She had a gross tonnage of 1360.75 tons and a net tonnage of 1082.79 tons. She was used to haul bulk cargoes such as iron ore, coal and grain. She was also one of the first vessels to load iron ore in Two Harbors, Minnesota when the port opened in 1884. In 1888 the Spencer was sold to B.L. Pennington (Lockwood Taylor & Company). In 1889 the Spencer was transferred Lockwood Taylor Hardware Company (2/3) and B. F. Powers (1/3). In 1895 she was transferred to the Commercial Transit Company. In 1899 the Spencer was sold to the Tonawanda Iron & Steel Company of Tonawanda, New York. On September 9, 1901, the Spencer was sailing down the west channel of the Niagara River when she grounded at the head of Little Island. When she was freed she was towed by the tugs that freed her to a dock. The 1,400 tons of iron ore that was in the Spencer's cargo hold was consigned to the Tonawanda Iron & Steel Plant. The Spencer's grounding was caused by low water levels in the river. The Amboy (Official number 95276) was a wooden schooner barge that was constructed specifically for the Minnesota's iron ore trade. She was built in 1874 by Quayle & Murphy of Cleveland, Ohio. She was 209.3 feet (63.8 m) in length, her beam was 34.2 feet (10.4 m) and her cargo hold was 14.4 feet (4.4 m). She had a gross tonnage of 893 tons, and a net tonnage of 849 tons. She could carry approximately 1,500 tons of cargo. She was originally named Helena. In July 1891 the Helena sank in a collision in the Little Mud Lake, St. Marys River with the loss of one life. On August 26, 1892, the Amboy arrived in Cleveland, Ohio, full of water. She was traveling from Escanaba, Michigan, when she was caught in a storm. Eventually the amount of water pouring into her hull became too much for the pumps to empty. She was eventually saved by the tugboats Gregory and Blazier; they towed the Amboy to Cleveland.

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Property data from the National Register of Historic Places, National Park Service (public domain).

Description adapted from Wikipedia under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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